by Lou Cameron
He swung the tiller to cruise closer to the south bank. She asked how he knew they were more likely to find a good place on that side of the river. He said, “Easy. The bandits we were told about range north of the Segovia. This south bank’s under nominal Nicaraguan jurisdiction, and fortunately the Nicaraguan Liberals and Conservatives are holding this year’s civil war way the hell to the south.”
As they rounded another bend, Gaston called back from the bows, “Regardez! We approach a jam of traffic ahead!”
That may have been putting it a little strong. Out in midstream a trio of disconsolate Indians were drifting with the current and bailing like hell in a dugout that looked as if it just didn’t want to float anymore. One was a man and the other two were women. It was easy to tell even at this distance, since none of them wore a stitch. But as Captain Gringo swung the tiller, Gaston spotted the headband of the male in the stern and called back, “Mais non, Dick! They are Lenca, and Lenca can be très bad news!”
Captain Gringo called back, “They’re about to sink too, and those eye bumps following them don’t belong to a big frog! Cover them as I swing alongside, but let’s not overdo the every-man-for-himself crap. They don’t seem to have even a paddle, let alone a bow and arrow between ’em!”
By now the Indians had spotted them too, of course, and the man in the stern stopped bailing long enough to shout in bad Spanish, “Do not shoot, in the name of God! We are Cristianos like yourselves, see? By the beard of Santa Maria we are not your enemies! Some of my best friends are Spanish!”
The American girl who owned the launch had trouble following Spanish spoken right. So Captain Gringo had to translate as he moved her boat alongside. Phyl said, “Oh, the poor things. We can’t let them drown, Dick.”
“They should be so lucky,” Captain Gringo snorted as he swung the tiller at the last minute to avoid running the half-swamped dugout down. One of the naked girls in the bow reached out to grab the gun’l of the launch and bump the canoe against its side as Captain Gringo stopped the steam screw. As the two craft swung in a sluggish circle midstream, the crocodile circled closer. Gaston blew one of its eye bumps to a bloody froth and all three Lencas laughed like hell. They’d obviously been all too aware of the croc and its attentions for some time.
The male Indian lifted the hem of the mosquito netting and said, “We are sinking faster now. Is it permitted for to come aboard?”
Captain Gringo nodded and, having had a closer look at their canoe by now, asked, “How did you get all those bullet holes in your canoe, amigo?”
The man climbed over the rail first, since Indians were vague on lifeboat drill, but the girls followed fast as he said, “I am called Alejandro. These are my wives, Maria and Santa Rosa. Before God, I do not know who opened up on us from shore just at sunset, or for why. There was another hombre and his mujer with us when we came under fire. They went over the side, along with the paddles. We have been drifting all night, trying for to stay afloat. As you just saw, we were losing the battle when God sent you around the bend to us, señor! One can get most tired, bailing all night, even with crocodiles encouraging one to greater effort!”
One of his wives said something in their own liquid lingo and Alejandro turned to stare impassively as the canoe went under with a last soft gurgle. Some waterlogged hardwood was like that. The young Indian shrugged and said, “Women always state the obvious. But both my wives are pretty, as you can see, señor. If I let you and the other señor fuck them, would you carry us back upstream to our own country?”
Captain Gringo smiled sheepishly, wondering how much of this old Phyl was following, and said, “We were about to make camp for the day. When it’s safe to travel again, we’ll naturally be glad to drop you off near your own village, out of arrow range of course, and naturally there will be no charge.”
Gaston, who’d been following the conversation from his side of the steam boiler, peered around it for a better look and cackled, “Speak for yourself, my unselfish youth! That younger one is not at all bad, hein?”
Captain Gringo opened the steam throttle again and switched to English as he replied, “Behave yourself, Gaston. A lot of white men would still have scalps to wear if they hadn’t messed with Indian women!”
“Oui, but we are not in your tragique Great American West and the man just made an honest offer. Besides, Lencas do not take scalps. I think they keep the whole head.”
“You keep your damned head out of that girl’s lap, anyway.” Captain Gringo laughed as he steered for the south bank again. At his side, Phyl giggled and asked, “Oh, are they proposing some sort of sex ritual, Dick? How quaint!”
He told her to shut up and told the Indians to make themselves comfortable, or at least sit still, on the cordwood between them and the boiler. They did. But one of the Lenca girls looked curiously at the mysterious machinery amidships and put out a hand to explore a brass gauge. She snatched it back with a cry of pain and her husband laughed, explaining, “Santa Rosa has never been out of the forest before. All women are ignorant, but she is stupid about hot metal, even for a woman.” Then he switched to their own tongue to explain, not unkindly, that it wasn’t a good idea to handle the mysterious objects of the white people unless they were smart, like him. It soon developed Alejandro sold gum and hides to Hispanic or Paya traders on occasion and that he’d learned his Spanish from a captive missionary. So he considered himself pretty Big City.
That caused Captain Gringo to question him about the situation farther upstream as he watched the bank this far downstream for a place to put in. But the young Lenca couldn’t shed much light on the subject. He said his own band roamed the western fringes of the lowland rain forest and had as little to do as possible with the Hispanic settlers or even Hispanic bandits farther up the river. He knew about El Viejo del Montaña and seemed to think a man who shot land-grabbing farm folk couldn’t be all bad. But while El Viejo del Montaña was said to be of Indian blood, he and his guerrillas didn’t seem interested in liberating their more primitive relations.
When Captain Gringo asked if it wasn’t possible some of the guerrillas had been using his canoe for target practice, the husky Lenca shook his head and said, “The Old One and his followers never come this far east. They are said to have a stronghold high in the Colon Mountains, where one must wear shirts, even in the daytime. Their fight is with the planters on the pine savannahs of the high country. I think I know who shot at us last night. I think it must have been a party of gum gatherers from Gracias a Dios. They always seem to wish for to kill us on sight.”
“Any idea why, Alejandro?”
“Perhaps it is because we kill them on sight? They have no title to the trees they tap in our hunting grounds, so it is only just that when one of us sees a stranger abusing our trees and scaring game away, he should perhaps put one or two reed arrows in him for to discourage such practices. But it seems to upset them and they say bad things about us. They say we are savages. Do we look like savages to you, Señor Deek?”
Captain Gringo managed to keep a straight face as he assured the naked Lenca he could see they were ladies and gents. It wasn’t easy. Santa Rosa sat facing him with her open groin exposed and Maria, while seated more sedately, had saucy eyes and a great pair of knockers waving in the breeze between them. Alejandro himself, while shorter and stockier than most white men, had a dong most men of any race would envy and seemed oblivious to the way poor Phyl was trying to avoid noticing as he sat on a log, legs braced comfortably apart.
Captain Gringo knew better than to try to change the mind-set of an Indian who felt wronged by whites or mestizos. Trying to get an illiterate who dressed more civilized to consider an Indian human could be frustrating too. Meanwhile Alejandro was in their debt, exhausted, and, more to the point, unarmed. So what the hell.
It was getting hotter now, and the bank went on looking a lot more hostile than their unexpected passengers. The riverside trees reached well out into the water with their stilt roots. He
spied a few inlets that might lead into oxbow backwaters, but the idea was to find dry ground. There didn’t seem to be too much of that around here.
Alejandro sprawled back across the hard bumpy firewood and closed his eyes, naked dong exposed for admiration. His two wives seemed less interested in that than catching some shut-eye themselves. As all three Lencas dozed, Phyl asked Captain Gringo in English, “Do you think we can trust them, Dick?”
He said, “As much as you can trust half the people you meet around here, I guess. Indians tend to follow their own rough version of the Golden Rule. If they think you don’t like them, they don’t like you. If you act like a friend, they tend to treat you like a friend. It’s more all-or-nothing with them than with us. That’s why the poor bastards don’t own much of America anymore.”
“But I’ve always heard these jungle tribes were particularly treacherous, Dick.”
“You have to be more civilized to be really treacherous, Phyl. That guy there would probably kill a stranger for a nice rifle or, hell, the salt in his rucksack. But he’d share his last food or, as you heard, his women, with a friend. Hold the thought. I think I see red clay ahead.”
She didn’t. She asked, “How do you imagine he can keep from getting a you-know-what, running around naked with two naked girls all the time, Dick?”
“An erection? Easy. He’s been running around naked with naked women all his life and a guy has to do something else once in a while. They hunt, fish, and eat together in the same state of naked innocence. It’s no big deal to see a flash of ankle under a skirt when nobody you know wears skirts, see?”
“Those other Indians in British Honduras acted awfully, ah, keyed up when I photographed their love rites that time.”
“I’ll bet. You seem a little keyed up on the subject right now and you’ve got all your duds on. Look at it this way. In Moslem countries a woman’s face is hidden from public view and I guess an Arab Peeping Tom gets a real charge out of seeing the naked nose of his neighbor’s wife. But Queen Victoria holds court with her naked nose hanging out and nobody gets a hard-on. It’s a matter of what one’s used to seeing or not seeing, see?”
“Do you have to be so vulgar, Dick? Erection is the scientific way to put it!”
Captain Gringo knew where he’d want to put it if they didn’t change the subject. So he said, “That clay bank ahead looks like as good a place as we’ll find, this far downstream.” Then he called out, “Hey, Gaston?” and the Frenchman called back, “Oui, steady as she goes and I shall leap gaily ashore avec the painter.”
He did. The bump woke the Indians and they offered to help, but Captain Gringo told them to stay put and keep out of the way as Gaston leaped from the grounded bow and whipped the painter around a sturdy tree trunk. Once they were secure Captain Gringo cut the throttle and the stern swung sluggishly with the current to lay the launch snug against the bank.
It only took a few minutes for Captain Gringo, Gaston, and the two Indian girls to unload such camping gear as they’d need for the day. Phyl saw no need to help since she was a white lady, and Alejandro just sat there since he was an Indian gentlemen.
The ground was dry and clearer, once they were away from the bank and well under the forest canopy. It didn’t look like rain and the one thing they didn’t need was shade. But the two soldiers of fortune broke out some machetes anyway and began to erect shelters of brush. Maria and Santa Rosa giggled and took the machetes away to show the clumsy white men how it was done in their neck of the woods.
The two little brown girls swung machetes with a skill that made Gaston observe, as he watched at a safe distance, “Eh bien, if their husband was just joshing their virtue is très safe with me! Mais, damn, Santa Rosa does have a très formidable derrière, non?”
Captain Gringo growled, “Jesus H. Christ, am I the only person in this expedition who hasn’t got an orgy on his or her mind?”
He saw, once they had the camp laid out, that Alejandro’s thoughts, if anything, seemed purer than his own. His wives had built a large cozy shelter for the three of them, taking care that the leafy sides assured privacy. But from the fussing noises once Alejandro had crawled in it with them, he was telling them to for chrissake let a man who’d had a hard night get some sleep. The girls must not have worked so hard at bailing. Santa Rosa came out as mad as a wet hen and Maria followed, crying softly.
It wasn’t Captain Gringo’s problem. He picked up a water canteen, some hard tack, and a can of beans and repaired to his own quarters, if that was what one wanted to call them. The Lenca girls had built all four shelters sort of small scale. But then, they were small-scale housekeepers, when one thought about it, and at least the leafy little cave was well padded with a Spanish moss floor mat and just wide enough for a man Captain Gringo’s size to stretch out in.
Before he could, while he was still eating cross-legged in the sort of green igloo, Phyl Blanchard crawled in with him, dragging some of her luggage. She said, “Here you are, you mean thing. Are you trying to avoid me for some reason, Dick?”
He moved over to make room as she joined him, but said, “Yeah. I told the girls to run up individual shelters because even under these trees it’s going to get pretty hot before nightfall. We’ll all be more comfortable lazing the day away naked and, well, we’re not exactly engaged, you know. Want some of these beans?”
“I just had some canned tuna and evaporated milk, and right now I feel more sick to my stomach than hungry. I think the tuna was a mistake but the thought of beans in this heat is even more disgusting.”
“Okay, you don’t want to eat and you don’t want to sleep, what’s left?”
“Don’t talk dirty. As civilized people, we of course have to behave ourselves. But those Indians have lovely bodies and I was wondering if you’d help me get them to pose for some pictures now.”
He tossed his can out the door and recapped the canteen as he asked just what sort of poses she had in mind, adding that Alejandro for one was out like a light and that the last time he’d seen the two girls they were sulking a lot and that he didn’t understand their dialect.
Phyl said she’d just seen them talking to Gaston and so Gaston probably understood Lenca. He laughed and said, “Gaston speaks a universal language that gets his face slapped a lot. But I guess it’s okay, as long as their husband is asleep in the first place and gave permission in the second.”
“Oh, dear, do you imagine Gaston means to trifle with one of those Indian girls, Dick?”
“Gaston, trifle with one of them? Surely you jest! Maybe I can get them to hold a spear for you or something, later. Right now I’d leave them alone. Meanwhile, why don’t you go back to your own shelter and get out of those heavy duds? You’re already starting to sweat or, okay, glow, and it’s still early in the day.”
She ignored his friendly advice and opened what he’d thought might be a picnic basket to take out a big box camera. She frowned up at the low leafy ceiling and observed. “Even with the new Pathe film one would have to hold the pose in here quite a while. It would be better if we could get them to pose under full sunlight.”
He shrugged and said, “Even I know that. I was with a motion picture expedition a while back and they had to shoot in full sunlight. You still haven’t told me how you expect to get pictures worth selling out of the wild Indians on hand, Phyl. It’s not as if they’d come to us in a big bunch, gussied up in Sioux bonnets and beads, you know.”
She said, “Oh, I carry lots of props,” as she opened another basket to take out some mighty silly stuff. Captain Gringo was no anthropologist, but even he could see the Mexican papier-mâché masks and strands of artificial pearls just didn’t go with any Indian tribe he’d ever encountered.
He said so. She shrugged and said, “We have to put something on quaint natives when we record their quaint customs, Dick. People who simply go stark naked don’t look quaint. They just look sort of naughty and I never take naughty pictures.”
She got out a portfoli
o to show him the kind of pictures she took. He opened it across his knees, gulped, and asked, “You don’t call these naughty?”
She insisted they were educational as he turned the pages. Some few of the grinning savages she’d photographed in other places were, in fact, simply standing around bare-ass, albeit cluttered with costume jewelry and feather dusters he felt sure they’d never seen before. But a lot of the photos were just plain Dodge City dirty, even if Phyl seemed to think it didn’t count when people had darker skin than her own. He grimaced at the picture of a couple going sixty-nine and said, “This dame has Indian blood, but you never found her in any jungle. She’s got a vaccination mark. What was she, a Mission Indian or just some peon girl who needed the money?”
Phyl took the page in hand to examine it with a thoughtful frown as she said, “How odd, I didn’t notice. But then we were shooting indoors so they had to hold that pose quite a while and—”
“They held a pose like that?” he cut in, adding with a sardonic chuckle, “They must have had some self-control. Could you hold still for a time exposure with a guy doing that to you, doll?”
“Don’t be beastly. Do I look like a girl who poses in the nude?”
“I guess it’s okay if you just take the pictures. But I don’t know how to ask a lady to pose for such pictures even if I spoke her language. I think we’d better not try, Phyl. All kidding aside, Alejandro is a wild Indian, from a pretty wild tribe, and—”
“But he as much as said he didn’t mind if you and Gaston, you-knowed, with his wives,” she cut in. So he said, “It’s not the same. For one thing they tend to think photography is some sort of magic and they take magic a lot more seriously. For another thing, you’d play hell getting even Gaston to pose like that for posterity. It’s one thing to get carried away with a lady you’re sort of fond of. It’s another thing entirely to keep it up while someone’s asking you to hold the pose and watch the birdy!” She put the pictures away, sighing, “I’ll just never understand men. You all act so fresh and yet, when someone tries to approach the matter in a detached scientific way, you all act so coy.”